Despite my father’s ambition and his and my mother’s work ethic, they “farmed out,” as Afrikaans has it, during the late 1960s. By the time I started high school in 1961, my father, Boshoff, was already in a salaried job away from home, leaving my mother, Susanna, to maintain the farm by herself between weekends. The seventies, though, heralded better times. By the time my parents put the farm on the real estate market, my mother and my two youngest siblings were the only ones living permanently on the farm. While all of us later appertained back to the farm as an edenic time in the Steenekamp family life, it was the natural beauty and the togetherness of our whole family that we missed most. The camaraderie, though, hearkened to a much earlier time, before both my father and I left the farm in 1961 to attend the same high school, he as a math teacher and I as a student. Our joint move did not result in father-daughter togetherness: I was still in the school hostel, my father’s commute between town and farm took two and a half hours every day, and our paths never crossed. After my father moved on to an engineering job, I changed schools, and my older siblings started high school, the logistics of coming together as a family became even harder. After five years of disruption and anxiety, we were all happy to put the physical farm behind us. The farm as metaphor is a different matter—divorced from its material signified, it lives large in our memories as “home.”
After selling the farm, my father made his way up the career ladder in a whirling series of job changes. For almost a decade after he got his first job as an engineer rather than a teacher, my mother and the younger children followed him from one small town to the next. At last in 1973 he found employment worthy of his engineering education and drive: he was offered a job as a refrigeration engineer with the South African Bureau of Standards. The family—the household now reduced to my parents and two youngest siblings—reassembled in a nice house near my father’s work in Pretoria.
The rest of us had ventured into the world to each discover our own “Steenekamp,” or “Fortress of Stone.” By the late seventies, Lana and I were each living in our own houses, married and pregnant with our first children. Klasie had completed his military service in the Angolan border war (all the while managing to sidestep the army haircut by hiding his locks under a cap or helmet for two years). Carel had submitted to the haircut but circumvented the border by becoming a warden in Pretoria Central Prison, South Africa’s “factory of death” for political transgressors. Our youngest siblings were in high school, Hennie-Boshoff going on fifteen, and Tertia thirteen.
While my parents’ family life was certainly much more settled than before, time had brought its own new challenges. By the time I graduated from university in 1969, my mother started to suffer from a series of maladies—pain, itching, depression—that her doctors dismissed as “psychosomatic.” In those days, even more than today, that was just a polite way of saying it was all in her head. It was almost a relief when about four years into her misery, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease and started undergoing cancer treatments.
Such, then, was the situation on February 23, 1977, Lana’s twenty-sixth birthday, when my mother was awakened in the early morning hours by the knock of two policemen at the door. They gave her the news that my father, who was due back that day from a business trip, had died of a heart attack during his flight home. She was to accompany the officers to the morgue to identify him. When Klasie showed up while the messengers were still there, they told him in a whispered aside that he had better accompany our mother to the morgue. If you die on a plane, they said, the air in your body is pressurized. When you are taken off the plane, you swell like a vetkoek, or ball-shaped cake made out of bread dough, when it is dropped in hot oil. Klasie, who had seen his share of horrors during his stint in the army, offered to spare my mother that ordeal. She refused. “Pa’s body is part of what makes him Pa,” she said. “I lived with that body for almost thirty years.” Recognizing a nonnegotiable situation when he saw one, her oldest son drove her to the morgue. She never regretted her decision.
If anyone else showed care toward my mother during those first weeks of her widowhood, it wasn’t me. I lived in a town an hour away and was eight months pregnant when I stood over my father’s grave with the rest of my family. Marissa was born three weeks after my father’s funeral. She would have been his first grandchild. As I examined my daughter while we were still in the hospital, it got through to me. My father was dead. He would never see her. She would never know her Oupa Boshoff. And yet, there he was in her ancient newborn face: his puzzled frown, his spluttering outrage, his benign contemplation of the marvelous world.
After Peter and I had taken Marissa back home to the nursery we had prepared, complete with farm scene curtains and a print of a farmyard with a red cow (a style I would later come to know as American primitive), I vacillated between repressed grief and besottedness with my homemade miracle. For weeks I disappeared into a cocoon of new-mother solipsism. My brothers were each beset by his own struggle to find his way in the adult world. Lana, though five months pregnant, was the one who came to the rescue when Tertia called in the middle of the night to say my mother had fainted in the bathroom and knocked her head on the basin’s edge and was bleeding. When my mother was too sunken in depression and the aftermath of radiation and chemotherapy to fulfill a mother’s role at all, Lana was the one who took Boshoff shopping for clothes.
Boshoff, 14, and Tertia, 12. Christmas 1976. Our father died two months later.
Somehow everyone got through the hard years that followed. Lana, who lived near my mother in Pretoria and besides, at no matter how large a remove, has a “big heart, / wide as a watermelon,” continued to be the primary person taking care of her. Once I had a better handle on parenting, I kicked in on a smaller scale, cluttering my mother’s house with baby paraphernalia from eight to five while Peter was at work, or having her over in our town, Kempton Park, for week-long sleepovers, during which we did yoga together while Marissa napped. By the time Lana and I each had a second child, my mother’s cancer finally went into remission. My brothers, too, moved on, going to school and/or finding jobs, marrying, and discovering their own niches. Mine, it appeared, was my fascination with my children’s unfolding into their own selves. I turned it into a profession, albeit an unpaid one.
Never before had the brain diverted me as much as the two organs, “fresh from God,” inside my babies’ skulls. Since Peter was doing well in his climb up his career ladder, I became a full-time mother and observer of child development. I read everything about cognitive, affective, and moral development I could lay my hands on: Jean Piaget’s systematic study of cognitive development, with his own children as subjects; Maria Montessori’s method of enabling a child to learn independently in a prepared environment; Lawrence Kohlberg’s use of Piaget’s storytelling techniques to study the moral development of children; and Dr. Spock’s assurances that a parent’s instinct often trumps that of a doctor and that routine is a good thing as long as you don’t become rigid, and his sneaky Freudian insights about the development of the ego.
Mostly, though, I learned from my own children and their playmates. During the day, if I had time, or at night if I didn’t, I jotted down the highlights of my children’s days like Jane Goodall documenting her chimps. I have kept my data for the seven-year stretch from 1979 to 1985, recorded in 3½-by-4-inch “housewife’s diaries” that Northpark Pharmacy—my supplier of plasters (Band-Aids), baby Tylenol, and asthma medications—gave away at the start of each year. Here is a flavor of my WUI (writing-under-the-influence) scholarship:
01-28-1979. [Marissa 1 year 9 months old. Refers to herself as Zaza.] Marissa wants something from the shops.
Mamma: “Pick-and-Pay is closed.”
Marissa: “Zaza daddy new car ride. Buy key. Unlock Pick-and-Pay.”
08-10-1981. [Newton 1 year 9 months old. Since their births, Peter had spoken English to our children and I Afrikaans. Accordingly, they followed suit from their first words onward.]
Newton learns the [Afrikaans] words “kas,” “bed,” and “stoel.” That night while Marissa and I were showing off his new vocabulary to Daddy, Peter does the quiz as directed:
Peter: “What is this?,” pointing to each object in turn.
Newton responds [in English], “cupboard,” “bed,” and “chair.”
Like my parents and their story about little Gerdatjie at the bread counter, I now have aren’t-they-precious legends of my own. Are mine “better” because they are documented?
Though I’m glad I have my notebooks, what matters about those years, are, of course, not the data, but rather the love writ large in my long-term memory: a daddy who saw to the children’s needs to “play rough,” who set up pranks, made up bedtime stories about Jo the Schmo and Willie the Fink, and who acquired the first home computer available in South Africa, an Apple I that used a voice recorder as a memory source and on which almost three-year-old Marissa played Frogger. I remember the oumas and aunts and cousins at whose houses they had their first sleepovers and who became their playmates for a day or sleepover buddies for a weekend or a week; a kitchen with worktable and a cupboard of art supplies, where they could play art or math or science any time of the day; shelves brimming with books in almost every room of the house; a pirate’s chest overflowing with Lego treasures; a garden with dewdrops on cobwebs, earthworms, leaves patterned with veins, all overseen at night by “the new Moon / With the old Moon in her arms.”
Doña Quixote: Parenting gives you a second chance at being a child.
Dementia Field Notes
11-15-2013
Diane had eye surgery. Back home she was supposed to put in antibiotic drops twice a day. She couldn’t manage it, so she phoned me. I helped her with it morning and evening for the rest of the week. When she sat on a kitchen chair tilting her head, Bob was very interested in what was going on—he stood behind Diane’s chair so close that the side of his body touched mine. While Diane was holding still, he petted as much of her head and shoulders as he could reach, while murmuring unintelligible phrases. His body language and facial expression were loving. Diane wrily remarked that he thought she was his mother.
The Neolithic Ensisheim skull, found in Alsace, France, and dated approximately ten thousand years old, bears the mark of two trepanations performed years apart. A trepanation is the oldest surgical procedure for which there is archaeological evidence. A healer or spiritual leader would drill or scrape a hole into the human skull to treat diseases such as migraines or epileptic seizures. Trepanning was used almost unaltered until the Renaissance, other than that the drills of each period reflected the technological materials of the time, from rock to steel to diamond. Today, the procedure is known as craniotomy. Neurosurgeons sometimes use it to gain access to brain structures for placing monitors and to relieve the pressure in the skull after a brain hemorrhage. Given the precision of modern bone cutting tools, surgeons cut the hole with minimal damage to the circular “trapdoor.” The bone is now placed back in the hole as soon as possible after surgery.
The journal Archeology reports that, despite the crude tools used on the Ensisheim skull, the hole “toward the front, measuring 2.6 by 2.4 inches, had healed completely. The second hole had only partially healed, probably because of its enormous size (3.7 by 3.6 inches). The long-term healing evident from the bone… [through] post-surgery regrowth… indicates the operations were successful.” In addition, single skulls with multiple trepanation holes have been recovered from Peru to Europe to China. Multiple holes in the same skull, each in a different stage of bone regrowth, confirm that Neolithic patients survived successive operations separated by time intervals ranging from months to decades.
Since no form of metallurgy had yet been invented, Neolithic trepanning holes were cut with a sharp-edged flint knife, starting with a circular or rectangular groove. The surgeon then cut and scraped the bone deeper and deeper until the dura mater, or tough fibrous membrane forming the outer envelope of the brain, was penetrated. The bone removed from the skull was too shattered for the healer to close the opening with it after the procedure. Given that these surgeries were performed without anesthesia or antiseptics and with what today seem like very primitive tools, our forebears’ achievement of neurosurgery with a more than 50 percent survival rate is nothing short of remarkable.
How had the man from Ensisheim borne the pain of two trepanations? One explanation is twentieth-century neuroscientists’ finding that the bones of the skull and brain tissue lack pain-sensitive nerve fibers. However, certain areas of the scalp, muscles of the head, and blood vessels along the surface of the brain do have pain sensors. Accordingly, as if to concede something to the seeming horror of ancient trepanation, today’s craniotomy patient receives at least a local anesthetic before the opening of the scalp, “a prick… like a bee sting.” Hospital websites disclose that during the opening of the scalp there will be “a tugging sensation as the skin is cut.” The British Journal of Neurosurgery reports that the “significant noise and vibrations” of craniotomy drills lead to sensorineural hearing loss. Amazingly, though, patients withstand the surgery tolerably well, even if most of them do need narcotics afterward for up to four weeks to manage their pain, and after that, over-the-counter painkillers and anti-inflammatories for months, sometimes years.
Still, both our ancestors’ forbearance of trepanation procedures and modern craniotomy patients is testament to the mind’s capability to override some of the most painful sensations generated by our bodies. In the nineteenth century, Sir Charles Lyell formulated the concept in a passage about the evolutionary growth of the minds of animals and man throughout Earth’s history:
It may be said that, so far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth at successive geological periods of life—sensation, instinct, the intelligence of the higher mammalia bordering on reason, and lastly, the improvable reason of Man himself—presents us with a picture of the ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter. [My emphasis.]
The relation between mind and matter is today the central concern of the discipline we know as neuroscience, the study of mind. This field has been developing for just over fifty years. At the start of that decade “there was no unifying theory of brain-behavior relationships. In fact, before the 1960s, few neuropsychology practitioners existed.”
In 1983, the day came when Hennie-Boshoff and Tertia were both done with Matric, the country-wide government-administered university entrance exam; he was going to medical school, and she was embarking on a career in HR. My mother, Susanna, was fifty-nine years old. She had been a widow for six years, and now her children were grown. She was free. She sold the house, stored what was worth keeping, and took to the road with only those possessions she needed for everyday use. She was yearning for something more exotic than just another “Steenekamp.”
Susanna journeyed southward to the birthplace of white South Africa, the Cape of Good Hope. She traveled south at a leisurely pace, stopping along the route wherever she had friends and acquaintances. After reconnecting with relatives and friends in Cape Town, the city where she had lived before our family’s move to the farm, she wended her way northeast to Stellenbosch, where she had gone to university and met my father, then dropped south toward the ocean. Following the Garden Route toward the Knysna Wilderness, she scouted out the wayfarer destinations dotting the edge of the continent: the town of Hermanus, where a whale crier bellows out sightings of southern rights mating or calving in the bay; the rocky headland at Cape Agulhas that constitutes Africa’s southernmost tip and where visitors cannot resist the attempt to identify the precise ridge of ocean eddies that connect the left-lobe Atlantic to the right-lobe Indian Ocean. She slept over in rural Bredasdorp, which spills down the Preekstoel Hill amid undulating fields of wheat; she lingered in the harbor town of Mosselbaai, where our Middle Stone Age forebears sheltered in caves in the sea-facing cliffs, from where they harvested the ocean bounty, including shellfish brimming
with the omega-3 fatty acids that would fuel the development of our large modern brains. At some point, she came to a stop in a picturesque town named for George III, the Mad King of England during the time of Waterloo, a former woodcutters’ settlement that nestled in a fertile valley a hanetreetjie, or cock’s stride, from the coast, a xanadu surrounded by the Outeniqua Mountains, indigenous forests, fast-flowing rivers, lush farmlands, and exquisite fynbos, a vegetation type so rare that it occurs only in a hundred-by-two-hundred-kilometer-wide coastal belt that constitutes the Cape Floral Kingdom, the most richly diverse of Earth’s six plant kingdoms.
It took only a few days’ looking around before Susanna knew she had found her personal “Parke [with] goodly meadows, springs, rivers, red and fallow Deere [gravid with] Fawnes.” She bought a house, had her furniture trucked from the Transvaal, and moved in.
The brain’s four major prominences are known as lobes. Each lobe is named for the bone of the skull that overlies it. Accordingly these gyri are known as the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes. The back three, that is, the parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes, are involved with the input of information into the brain, whereas the frontal lobe is responsible for the output of all information resulting in planned, voluntary actions. According to my MRI report, my detected lesions are (so far) all in the frontal lobe.
The input role of the temporal lobe is primarily centered on hearing. Much of what is known about its functions comes from studying people who have had damage of some kind in this area. In both the right and left hemispheres, the temporal lobe has a small area about the size of a Kennedy half-dollar that is responsible for hearing and is known as the auditory cortex. The temporal lobe is also involved in perception and memory.
Memory's Last Breath Page 9